Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

gga

Don't worry, there won't be any spoilers, or
anything even remotely like a spoiler in this post. I'm not doing that
to this book.

I liked this book, a lot. It would probably be my favourite of the
series. The ending really nicely wraps up the story without leaving
any major open holes. Everything that is supposed to happen,
happens. Which, according to
Rosencrantz & Guildensten Are
Dead, is the definition of when a story is supposed to
finish.

Two days before reading this book, I was talking to a friend at lunch
about books. He was complaining that the ending of Neal Stephenson’s
Cryptonomicon doesn’t live up to the rest of the book. I then made
the extraordinary claim that no book I’ve ever read had an ending that
could live up to whatever expectations had been built during the
previous few hundred pages of the story.

And then this book comes along and makes a liar of me. Maybe my
expectations were lowered by reading a kid’s fantasy adventure; maybe
it was exhaustion: finishing at 4.30am after reading continuously all
day. I’m a slow reader, I know. Whatever it was, I thought the ending
actually worked.

Many people choose to regard Harry Potter with some funny mix of
amusement and contempt. You’re probably missing the point. It’s a fun,
easy to read fantasy epic that doesn’t take itself too
seriously. There is a special skill in writing something that is both
easy and enjoyable to read.